The Grace of Peripheral Vision

On stillness and watching for the unseen wings of Resurrection

“Light and life to all He brings / Ris’n with healing in His wings.” So wrote Charles Wesley circa 1739 in his “Hymn for Christmas Day,” echoing Malachi 4:2 which foretells that “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.” For some reason Wesley didn’t manage to work in the second half of that verse: “and you will go out and playfully jump like calves from the stall.” By the end of this post I might manage to bring those two images together. We’ll see. My question this week is, how does the risen Jesus bring light and life? What is the manner in which his healing wings appear?

The path toward answering this will be winding and long, and potentially overloaded with metaphor, analogies, and poetry. I don’t have a TL;dr summary this week, but instead have tried to leave a trail for you by leaving my own meditations in wandering form. The answer itself is indirect, and the quickest way to the destination is the detour.

A Favorite Childhood Memory

Patience. Stillness. Endurance. Peacefulness. These are some of the qualities trained in me by chickadees in the pinewoods of northern Wisconsin. Throughout childhood my family vacationed at my aunt and uncle’s house in Three Lakes, WI. Having grown up in a Midwestern suburb where birds fled from our apartment courtyard at the slightest movement, I was intrigued but doubtful when my aunt asked if I wanted to feed birds by hand. Well, “intrigued” doesn’t do justice to my 11-year-old self. I have always had a special love for animals (and of course veterinarian seemed the obvious career choice for many years), and I was downright giddy at the prospect of wild birds alighting on my palm. Fortunately, I’ve never been a visibly excitable person, even as a child, and I think that helped me both feel and appear calm.

My aunt and uncle always had bird feeders out, a local dive for smaller fowl, but it was temporarily placed inside so I could park my mobile hand truck and avoid competition. After a little waiting, a black-capped chickadee flew onto the branch of a hemlock tree just above the second-story deck where I was seated, hand resting over the railing. The chickadee quickly flew away, though, and I felt a twang of disappointment. But my aunt had encouraged me to be patient, so I took a breath, and kept waiting. The small black-and-white bird flew back into view, again settling onto a branch where she could see me; but not just see, watch, eyeing me for the smallest sign of movement, of life, of danger. Plucking up courage, she flew down onto the rail just out of reach, again eyeing me, and the tempting food in my hand. I couldn’t focus my eyes on her, as that would require moving my head and revealing my aliveness. With the the stiff lifelessness of a cadaver, I could only turn my eyes to the periphery. I saw her there, blurry at the edge of vision, and I held my breath, waiting. That’s when the miracle happened. She hopped a few times until the next hop landed her small tiny talons on the flesh of my palm. She briskly picked up a seed in her beak, and flew back onto the hemlock branch to eat. It was over as soon as it happened. But it was glorious. Small, fleeting, but in the words of George MacDonald, “a winged glory.”

This experience is just one example of the many ways in which, as Iain McGilchrist put it, “the best things in life hide from the full glare of focused attention. They refuse our will.”¹ Indeed, instead of submitting to our will, it is us that need to submit, not in servitude but in stillness. I had to honor the will of the chickadee, respect her freedom to come and go at her pleasure. It is when we sit in open receptivity, with what McGilchrist calls diffuse or global attention, that beauty alights and bestows her gifts.

“Melodies Unheard”

What I have said so far, many others have said before and said better. In his 1865 novel Alec Forbes of Howglen, George MacDonald tells the story of young Alec growing up and navigating life’s difficulties in MacDonald’s homeland of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The son of a simple farmer, Alec’s higher-class mother noticed his intellectual gifts and arranged for him to attend college. The following scene where Alec finds himself in a new city sets the stage for one of the handful of Alec Forbes quotes which C.S. Lewis included in his anthology George MacDonald: 365 Readings. I’m using a longer excerpt, but it beautifully illustrates what we’re exploring here in the grace of peripheral vision.

“Alec was shown into a room where a good fire was blazing away with a continuous welcome; and when seated by it drinking his tea, he saw the whole world golden through the stained windows of his imagination.²

But his satisfaction gradually passed into a vague longing after something else. Would human nature be more perfect were it capable of being satisfied with cakes and ale? Alec felt as if he had got to the borders of fairy-land, and something was going to happen. A door would open and admit him into the secret of the world. But the door was so long in opening, that he took to unpacking his box [ie suitcase]…

He rose in the morning with the feeling revived, that something intense was going on all around. But the door into life generally opens behind us, and a hand is put forth which draws us in backwards. The sole wisdom for man or boy who is haunted with the hovering of unseen wings, with the scent of unseen roses, and the subtle enticements of “melodies unheard,” is work. If he follow any of those, they will vanish. But if he work, they will come unsought, and, while they come, he will believe that there is a fairy-land, where poets find their dreams, and prophets are laid hold of by their visions. The idle beat their heads against its walls, or mistake the entrance, and go down into the dark places of the earth…

[Alec, a country boy, is now in the city and marveling at all the commotion and novelty]

What is this nimbus³ about the new? Is the marvel a mockery? Is the shine that of demon-gold? No. It is a winged glory that alights beside the youth; and, having gathered his eyes to itself, flits away to a further perch; there alights, there shines, thither entices. With outstretched hands the child of earth follows, to fall weeping at the foot of the gray disenchanted thing. But beyond, and again beyond, shines the lapwing of heaven—not, as a faithless generation thinks, to delude like them, but to lead the seeker home to the nest of the glory.”⁴

The section about “unseen wings” and “melodies unheard,” which I originally read in Lewis’ anthology, is worth repeating, but I’m going to suggest one amendment:

“But the door into life generally opens behind us, and a hand is put forth which draws us in backwards. The sole wisdom for man or boy who is haunted with the hovering of unseen wings, with the scent of unseen roses, and the subtle enticements of “melodies unheard,” is stillness.”

“Stillness” might not be the best substitution, but “work” doesn’t quite fit how I understand MacDonald’s meaning in 21st century language. There is a kind of work, more common in MacDonald’s day, that facilitates receptivity. Today, and quite ironically, we call it “idle work.” That is, work that we can do with the gear of our minds idling, not in motion but still, leaving us free to look out through the car windows to the world around us.

The Passive Turn

However we describe this illusive state of mind and body, MacDonald’s metaphor of a door opening behind, and a hand drawing us backwards, has helped me with a perplexing detail in the story of Mary Magdelen’s encounter with the risen Jesus in John 20. Most English translations render the verb “turn” in John 20:14 as active, eg CSB: “Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus.”

Scot McKnight helpfully translates the passive verb literally:

“Saying these things, she was turned to what was behind her and she observes Yēsous standing and she had not known that it’s Yēsous.”

John could have easily used the active voice⁵, but in both v. 14 and in v. 16 it is passive. Mary doesn’t actively turn. She is passively turned. Twice. By something else.

But what? What turned Mary around? Taking some poetic license (supported by the observation that Mary’s twofold turning alludes to the poetic Song of Songs, and possibly also Isaiah), I think of T.S. Eliot’s line in Burnt Norton: “The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery.”⁶ My formal study of English literature never extended beyond high school, but I’m guessing both Eliot—with his phrase “unheard music”—and MacDonald—with his explicitly quoted phrase “melodies unheard”—are allusions to Keats’ famous poem Ode on a Grecian Urn.

^{Photo by Gốm Sứ Cương Duyên on Unsplash}

The second stanza of that poem begins, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Both Eliot and MacDonald combine this notion of unheard music with being visited by that which hides and flees from direct effort.

MacDonald: “the hovering of unseen wings…will come unsought.”
Eliot: “Other echoes [of what might have been and what has been] / inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? / Quick, said the bird, find them, find them.” The meaning of Eliot’s poetry is just as illusive as the sought-after echoes, and though “they were as our guests, accepted and accepting,” the reader is turned away: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

The unseen wings and unheard music remain on the periphery of eye and ear. We can be alert to the threshold of sense, but small stimuli—like Elijah and the “gentle and quiet whisper” (1 Kings 19:12, The Message)—are only perceived in stillness. The human eye can detect the equivalent of a single candle flame from 2.76 kilometers away, but only under ideal conditions.⁷ That light is surely undetectable if it has to compete with light from lamps, phones, TVs, etc. But those aren’t the only obstacles. Who turns on the light when it’s 1.7 miles away? To use a MacDonald image (and Lewis after him), we can’t make ourselves cross over the twilight border between this world and fairy-land. All we can do is stand at the threshold and wait. Just so, we cannot make ourselves see or hear or taste or feel Beauty until it wills to be perceived. “The pneuma blows where it pleases” (John 3:8).

Jesus on the Periphery

This, in haltering, sputtering false starts—like a match not quite lit but smoldering from the focused beam of sunlight through a magnifying glass—is an attempt to understand Mary being turned around.

It’s almost as if Mary heard something, but only on the edge of perception, the periphery. Perhaps Jesus was softly humming a psalm as he tended the garden, and she only managed to hear him as she caught her breath in between sobs; “heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea.”⁸ Or perhaps Mary heard something in her heart, in her “spiritual unconscious,” to use Jacques Maritain’s phrase.

Maritain, in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, writes of

“the hidden workings of an immense and primal preconscious life. Such a life develops in night, but in a night which is translucid and fertile, and resembles that primeval diffused light which was created first, before God made, as the Genesis puts it, ‘lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night’ so as to be ‘for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.’ . . . Far beneath the sunlit surface thronged with explicit concepts and judgments...are the sources of knowledge and creativity, of love and suprasensuous desires, hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul.”⁹

Maritain also calls this the “musical unconscious” which can only be perceived “at the edge of consciousness.”¹⁰ This is why I don’t quite like MacDonald’s linking receptivity with work, which makes me think of being busy, unquiet, and heightened consciousness with left-brain focused attention. How can I hear unheard music in the depths of my soul if I am moving about, making noise, and focusing on tasks?

Maritain links this musical unconscious to a “translucid night.” What a striking phrase: likening night to a cloud that, though it floats between us and the moon, acts as a thin filter letting in lunar light. Night is when many wondrous—and dangerous—animals roam freely, animals which remain unseen and unheard during the day. Likewise, there is a translucid night when, and where, the human soul can hear and see things that live on the periphery. Like the “dove descending” Spirit. Doves are diurnal, not nocturnal, but Eliot connects this symbol of the Spirit with the dark¹¹:

“In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing”

We could veer off our path here with Eliot’s rich imagery, but Malcom Guite helps stay on track. According to Guite in the linked interview below, T.S. Eliot said that “poetry is peripheral vision.” Guite explains,

“The thing that is off [at the edge of vision] that you just can’t see, if you turn and focus on it it disappears. But Eliot thought the poet could stay sufficiently still so as to woo the peripheral into [view] and give it voice.”

In a similar but still different way, consider Mary through this lens of peripheral vision and unheard music. Mary came to the tomb “early, while it was still dark” (John 20:1). Through active willpower she tried to find Jesus (20:2, 11-13). She didn’t give up, crying tears and desperately crying out for her Lord.¹² In all that commotion and emotion, she wasn’t still.

But that grief, that nighttime sorrow, filled up a river that led her soul to a garden where she became quiet. Waiting. Exhausted and still to the point that she was open to being wooed by the peripheral. Still to the point of being turned “at the still point of the turning world.”¹³ Not wooing the peripheral into her view, but being wooed by the unheard music behind her in the garden, the unheard music which plays “at the still point, there the dance is.”¹⁴ Like Mary, and like the bride of the Song of Songs before her, we are turned around in the dance to the unheard tune of the Spirit:

“Turn around, turn around, Shulammite! Turn around, turn around, that we may look at you! How you gaze at the Shulammite, as you look at the dance of armies!” (Song 6:13 LXX)

To quote Eliot¹⁵,

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“Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

^{Photo by Cathy Schwamberger on Unsplash}

By standing still and waiting, we become receptive to the Spirit’s turning, turning us around to that which we otherwise cannot sense or hear or see.

This, I tentatively suggest, is the manner in which the risen Jesus makes himself known in the dark, how he reveals his healing wings when all we see is death and shadow. It is an inward journey of stillness. Like a dance, we don’t so much actively move as we are passively moved by the music, feeing the rhythm, allowing it to turn us around in a beautiful design. But for many (myself very much included), dancing is as uncomfortable as being still and quiet. Or maybe as awkward as jumping around like playful calves leaping out of the stall (Malachi 4:2, remember?).

Or to switch metaphors yet again, in the image of birds and unseen wings, it’s like MacDonald’s lapwing: “But beyond, and again beyond, shines the lapwing of heaven…to lead the seeker home to the nest of the glory.” Lapwings are a class of ground-nesting and wading birds, and the name’s etymology refers to a bird flapping as if it has a broken wings in order to lead predators away from its nest. There is certainly a paradox here. The Spirit leads us away in order to lead us home. Eliot again captured this paradoxical image:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”¹⁶

Like Mary, our search for Jesus, and the unseen wings of his resurrection, lead us to a garden. Not Eden, nor yet the garden of the New Jerusalem, but the home of the garden within, the “nest of the glory” made in our hearts by Father and Son through the unseen sheltering wings of the Spirit (John 14:17, 23).

Quote from George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul¹⁷

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“Yet hints come to me from the realm unknown; Airs drift across the twilight border land, Odored with life; and as from some far strand Sea-murmured, whispers to my heart are blown That fill me with a joy I cannot speak, Yea, from whose shadow words drop faint and weak: Thee, God, I shadow in that region grand.”

Question

If any of these ramblings makes any sense at all of your experience, what has that looked like for you? Where have you seen unseen wings and heard unheard music? How have you been graced and gifted from the periphery and the edges of your life?

1 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 181.

2 This passage is remarkably similar to the opening scenes of The Golden Key, especially the last paragraph and the line “beyond, and again beyond, shines the lapwing of heaven…to lead the seeker home to the nest of the glory.” I wonder if “the stained windows of his imagination” is similar to the symbolism of the golden key.

3 Ie halo cloud.

4 George MacDonald, Alec Forbes of Howglen (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1890), 147-148.

5 See Revelation 1:12 where John uses a similar verb for “turn” twice but with active voice. I believe both of these passages include allusions to Song of Songs 6:13, on which see below.

6 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1971), 14.

7 If you took intro to psychology you probably learned that the distance is 30 miles, but as the linked MIT article observes, this is a hard theory to test due to the curvature of the earth.

8 Eliot, Four Quartets, 59.

9 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art And Poetry (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 68-69.

10 Ibid., 67.

11 Eliot, Four Quartets, 52.

12 Notice the increased angst in the shift from “they’ve taken the Lord” in v. 2 to “they’ve taken away my Lord” in v. 13.

13 Eliot, Four Quartets, 15.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 15-16.

16 Ibid., 59.